Products such as antiperspirant are often dispensed in the form of sticks of wax-like consistency that are ejected from the top of a product container as the material is used.
Dispensers of this type have been assembled by pouring material that has been heated into a liquid state into the top of the container and letting it cool to form a solid, but this results in the application end of the stick being flat. Recently, that end of the stick has been made to have a more desirable convex shape by pouring the material into the bottom of the container while its top is in sealed contact with a concave mold that is part of an assembly hereinafter referred to as a pour cup. After the pouring is done, and while the material is soft, an ejection mechanism is inserted into the bottom of the container and embedded in the material. When the material has hardened, the container and product stick it contains are removed from the pour cup. Thus the pour cup is only used in the manufacturing process and is not part of the dispenser.
One of the problems that has been experienced in the bottom fill method just described has been difficulty in removing the container from the pour cup. This results from the fact that the seal between the container and the pour cup creates a vacuum between the product material and the mold so that ambient air pressure forces the container and the cup together with considerable force.
Another difficulty experienced during manufacture is that when the pour cups are changed from an in-line formation to a parallel formation in what is known as a bulk accumulator, they can become misaligned.
A further problem is that when one row of pour cups is forced against the next row as it is being carried along a conveyor belt, a phenomenon known as shingling occurs in which the pour cups become tilted.
Both misalignment and tilting interfere with automatic pouring as well as with the automatic insertion of the ejection mechanism into the container because either can cause a cup to be incorrectly positioned.